Godric's Hollow
by MissWolff
Summary: Lily and James deal with hiding, and eventually death. Interweaves with a Madam Pomfrey story and shows Hary, Hermione and Ron viewing that night through the Penseive.
1. Cabin Fever

His breath is long and even but I can hardly hear it. I put my ear close to his chest, red hair falling down around him. His baby chest, I see it moving up and down.

I sit cross-legged on the floor, nose poking through the bars and watch. His chest continues to rise and fall. I breathe with him, softly, silently. My fingers curl around the bars. I watch, cannot move myself from him. Won't move from him.

His father sleeps on the bed beside his cradle. He lays stretched out, a tuft of unruly black hair jutting out from his head, glasses sliding down his face. He is sprawled and sleeping and tired. His hand curls around his wand and he is still dressed in street clothes as if he were going somewhere or had just got back. His shoes flake dirt onto my hands as I take them off. He doesn't move, doesn't snore, doesn't breathe.

"Breathe! Breathe!" I tell him off.

A puff of air escapes his lips and I turn back to Harry.

They lay there and breathe. I watch, too torn to sleep. Full of aching longing. I curl onto the rough hardwood and listen, watch, breathe. They breathe back. My neck aches when I wake to James bespectacled face pulling me up to the bed.

"You're freezing."

I mumble, reach for his warm hands and listen for Harry's breath. He is crying for milk and I cradle him, groggily pull him to myself. I love him. James is in his pyjamas now, and I am too. He has cradled us both in a thick woolen blanket. He is kind and I lean against the kindness. I curl my body around his and he gently, gently hugs back.

We fought tonight, faces contorted, wands drawn. My voice went high-pitched and frantic. His turned cold and pretend apathetic. We are bored and frightened. The war is on our doorstep and rings loudly in the long silence of passing days and nights. Harry breaks and makes the monotony.

Each day James paces like a guard on duty, itching for action. He bounces on his heels at rattling from the house-elf Mumu, glares at her ugly, innocent mother face as if she ought to be quieter. She helped raise him, she is not to be frightened into silence. She smiles placidly back. I am glad. Her noise pacifies me, gives me a sense of normalcy. I think she knows.

He barked at Harry for crying, a rough father voice that wails in the same tenor as a Harry wail. Shook his finger at the wind for rattling the windows. Scowled at the fire for not burning bright enough. Polished the oak front door and the brass handle as if expecting company.

I was no better.

Harry was down for a nap and I was itching for something, anything useful to do. I brewed in the boiler room, frigid as Mad Edward passed in and out the door, haggardly silver, acting mournful as if nobody has had a worse century of it. I brewed for the Order, my hands smelly with giant squid tentacles and dragon blood. I chop and chop and chop. I hang sprigs of mistletoe to poison the fireflies that nestle in the old boards and sting Harry while he naps, slung tight to my hip.

That done, I itch with uselessness. I charm the door James polished, stepping over him in stag form at the front door. He has gotten hair all over the carpet and I toss my head. I glare and purse my lips. I want to fight. So does he.

Anything to break the monotony.

He flashes back to the thin, tall man with crazy hair. I flare at him.

"I told you! Don't be a stag in the house! It creates a smell and you _know_ we can't open the windows!" I sound like a snooty housewife and wince inwardly at the sound of my own voice.

"Fine!" He is growling, he sounds like Sirius. "Fine, then." A blast of air shoots from his wand and gathers the stag hair into a migrating hurricane of smelly fur, but does not stop there.

"You want the windows open? We're a perfectly capable pair of witch and wizard, aren't we, then?" And he opens the windows, a look of mad relief etched on his face. I revel in the smell of fall. I breathe it in, then flare up again as I feel Harry move against my thigh.

I slam the window shut. Fall is circumvented and the look of relief on James face remains frozen, as if he is in the full body lock. Harry has woken and cries for his milk. I ignore his bleating for the moment and watch my husband with pent-up energy, transferred to anger.

"What is it you want?" I screech, beyond reason. "Voldemort to show up on our doorstep?" I give a horrible laugh and Harry cries louder. My instincts urge me to care for him, and I reel the loose parts in. I gather Harry to my breasts, trembling, near to tears. I force myself to calmness, shooshing Harry, trying very hard to be perfect for him. I lower myself onto the couch and gather comfort from the soap smell of his black hair, the baby freshness of him.

James has stalked off and I hear him rattling in the kitchen. Harry is finished and grabs a handful of red hair from my scalp. "Muhhmuhhmuhhhmuhmmmmuh." He grins, a ten teeth in grin and baby-dives out of my hands and half crawls, half toddles to his play box.

James lurks in the doorframe, Rosmerta's watered down apple juice in a bottle shaped like a dragon. It spurts out a lick of apple juice then sucks it back in, blinking it's horribly real orange eyes at Harry who is clapping and cooing in glee. I force myself not to smile and turn from James, hunch myself into the sofa.

Harry slurps and plays. I feel terribly tired and my fingers itch to do something all at once. I feel James sit next to me. He does not speak but a flagon of butterbeer appears in front of me a moment later. I grudgingly grab hold of it and take a sip. James is taking gulps of something that smells like fire whiskey.

I turn to glare at the offending mug. "You know I can't! That is terribly rude."

"Oy! It's been so long! Besides, it's about time Harry learns to eat solids, isn't it? You want some?"

I glare at him but relent. It _has_ been a long time. I take his mug and drink deeply, feel hot tears pricking against my eyelids. I hate that I'm irrational. I feel as though I'm going mad, and I love them so!

"I don't really care if you're a stag in the house." I say thickly. I am tipsy off two mugs.

"And I don't really want the windows open." James is just as tipsy. It has been a very long time, and it seems to be particularly strong whiskey. "I mean, I do. But I don't. But I do." He is half incoherent and I love him for it. (He makes more sense that way, anyhow.)

"What I'd really like to do is go out. Like _out_. We could take Harry to the park. He could see the birds. I could take him for rides on my back. He could play in the bark chips." He smiles lopsidedly and droops a little.

I lift my wand and conjure songbirds. James turns into Prongs and Harry rocks about on James's back, grabs hold of his antlers. James lets out a high graceful note as I keep hold of Harry's tiny body. Harry shrieks in glee and the afternoon slides into soft evening.

But the glass lies thick between us and the smoldering sunset. James's hands lie fingerflat against the cold window as Harry sleeps. I am stalking again. Cabin-fever is upon us. A game of wizard's chess lies forgotten on the coffee table. The Weird Sister's chant an odd ditty.

And then we fight. Love is painful without reprieve and we feel it to the bones.


	2. Poppy

It is late night and Albus is gone. I sit up with a cup of comfrey tea warming my cold fingers, staring out the window, waiting for him. When he comes I will bury my nose in a book and pretend I was not waiting to say hello and goodnight. He will smile calmly, drink my tea, lay down his burdens beside my heavy hewed table and sleep will come at his gentle presence.

My elbows are propped by the castle window, chin cupped in my hands. The new moon is hidden in a hail of Filibuster's tonight and owls swoop. I scan the grounds, waiting for him. When he comes he will be all long shadow, and twinkling stars, I will hover in his shade while comforting his tired body and weighted heart. He is very late tonight.

There. I see him now. He pauses at the gate, leaning gently against the November freeze and swirling leaves, lifts his hands. Waves at me. Hand to heart, hand to me. I smile, flustered, send a hand up in greeting as I rummage, pretending I am in a deep and particularly interesting read, just as he knows I must pretend. A flick of the wand and his tea is seeping. I bend my head, don't look up when he comes in but smile a secret smile at my book and to him.

He sees it. I know. I can hear his secret hum. It is just for me. He is sipping the tea, waiting for me to lift my head.

His sky blue eyes are a sad twinkle.

I smile at him fondly. Old friend, dear protector. My hero.

_Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star._ I whisper it. He tilts his head to one side to catch the words._ How I wonder what you are._

He takes a thoughtful sip of tea. I wait for him to speak. Words are slow tonight. A sip for a sentence. A whole pot for a paragraph. Of course there are the things he will never share, no matter how I beg to carry it with him.

I begged him once to tell me all. To let me take his load with him. "I can handle it! Let me!" And I threw my shoulders back in pride and preparation.

Of course he did not. "You have burden enough for the whole world, Poppy." He said this mostly to himself, a deep sadness resonating from him. I have not pushed the matter since. There lies the separation.

After the death of Grendelvald Albus brought me to his home, his school: Hogwarts. Beside a wizard of no small repute, the world bent to greet me, where before they would have used and trampled me. He brought me to the hospital wing, and when I got up the next morning I did not leave and he never stopped bringing me flowers.

Soon I had tea waiting for him each night when he came with his flowers. Cold, strong english tea with red and yellow summer roses. Soft mint in the spring with lucky heather from the moors surrounding the lake. Seeped and boiled pumpkin seeds in the fall with white hyacinth. Comfrey drizzled with milk and honey while he breaks boughs of green pine, pinged with small red berries in the winter. We sat like that each night, year after year with our cups of tea, the flowers lying there untouched between us. And instead of kisses we began to trade words.

He is my father who is dead and burned, and the lover I can never have. I have never loved a man more.

Albus raises his eyes, watches me behind the mound of hyacinth while he drinks his tea down. He looks so old, so tired. I lift my hands, gingerly touch his knee as if to prod the terrible truth from him.

He swallows. "Dear Poppy. How I love you." And he smiles. I wait.

He watches a particularly fine firework explode in the inky black sky and beams in appreciation. "You'll be wanting to know?" He turns his eyes to me. I bite my lip.

"Voldemort?" My body is stiff when I say his name.

Albus brings his fingers together, and shakes his head in resignation.

"He is not dead. The final battle is only forestalled."

I swallow convulsively. "I heard news of Lily and James. But Harry? Will he be okay?" I rise to my feet in anxiety. "Should I tend to him? I will go to him." 

Dumbledore raises his hand and tugs me back down. He shakes his head at my raised eyebrows. "Give it ten years or so." He chuckles. "If he takes after his parents, I'm sure you'll get the chance."

I curl into the rocker with a quilt, clutching my tea, watching him. He puts his feet up with a groan of relaxation, high heeled boots toe up on my kitchen table. His chair is a portable loo on wheels, a standing joke between us. "I am old," he had said one day.

"You will never be old," I countered. "Never."

"Yes, I will." He was laughing when he said it. "I am not immortal, merely clever. There is a difference."

I had the chair ready for him the next day, wheeled in from the hospital wing two doors down. He sat down on his chamber pot with gusto, and drank his tea with his pinky finger out.

Now he stretches, like men do when they are comfortable and tired. He smiles at me and he loves me. "Poppy," he says. And he is silent in the warmth that follows. He swallows and looks at me with sudden agony. 

"I was too late for Lily and James. Too late for so many."

"Not too late for me!" My voice cracks. I have never spoken of it before.

He turns to me and is fierce now. "For you, latest of all." He moves forward, towards my hand lying on the table and grips it, moves up the sleeve of the robe. It is still there, a violent red against my pale skin, twisting like a bracelet from raised tail to forked tongue. "Some wounds never heal."

I love him more fully now then ever. This is a soft love that demands all of me. I move towards him. "No! All wounds heal." I lean closer and he looks surprised at my proximity. I roll my sleeve and rub Grendelvald's snake. We hear it hissing it's magic, it blisters my skin, Dumbledore was not able to remove it.

"Albus, we don't know what strange and beautiful things lie after life." I lean in closer. "It doesn't hurt. Not like it used to." I touch his lips with my shackled hand. He does not move, only looks at me.

His lips are warm and gentle and he responds when I kiss him. It is the first and fear is in my belly. He whispers in my ear to soothe. I keep kissing.


	3. The Pensieve: Part One

There were three thoughts that consoled him about the situation.

His first thought was that it would be the last time. He was able to look at the Number Four, Privet Drive with near fondness at this thought, with the idea that he'd never see the Dursleys again after this. No, Harry, would not miss Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia or his cousin, Dudley. Not one bit.

Second, for the very first time he was not coming alone. Ron and Hermione stood at his back as he rang the doorbell to the Dursley house and waited tentatively for the expected response.

Third, and maybe most importantly was that Harry would be safe. For the next two months Lord Voldemort could not touch Harry. Harry would be in the low-ceilinged heavily becharmed upstairs room of Privet Drive busy planning his attack on Voldemort's five remaining Horcruxes. He would be safely balanced between the fearful hatred of the Dursleys and the blood-battered bones of war.

Safety wasn't something that was likely to happen again until one or both were dead.

Aunt Petunia's eyes narrowed as she answered the ring, looking badly frightened at the trio standing on her doorsteps. She shooed them in like flea-bitten dogs, making them stand on a corner of an old dish rag while peering out the door window to check and see if anyone had seen her unlucky chance.

"Bloody hell." Ron scuffed his feet against the dish rag and teetered on the edge. "The old hag."

Hermione snorted in a superior sort of way. "The old witch!" She had said it loud enough for Harry's aunt to hear.

Aunt Petunia bristled and approached them as if they were circus animals. She eyed Hermione but didn't object to Hermione's use of the 'w' word, probably because of Hermione's foreboding glare. "When my husband comes home," she started haughtily, "we will discuss your stay here and all implications this brings. In the meantime, I expect you to stay in Harry's room, all of you." And she stalked off, muttering under her breath.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione struggled up the narrow stairwell with Harry's school trunk which was bulging with all three friend's possessions. "Enough of this!" Hermione huffed, and slapped her wand against the oak, making the trunk feather light.

"It's not as if the Dursleys aren't aware of magic," Hermione defended. "And the Ministry of Magic wouldn't dare put you on trial for such a silly trifle at a time like this!" Harry, being slightly more acquainted with Scrimgeour, wasn't nearly so certain, but didn't say anything to the contrary.

The room was just as Harry remembered from the summer before. It smelled strongly of bleach and orange smelling spray. Harry suspected that Aunt Petunia had sanitised everything at his departure last July.

"It's not so bad," Hermione said unconvincingly, settling herself on a rug and digging through the trunk for her books. "So what's first?"

Harry didn't answer. He felt very strange, indeed. He had never thought to have his two best friends in the house he'd grown up in. His two worlds had just merged, and he felt the same surrealism as when dementors had glided down Magnolia, Mrs. Figg had turned out to be a Squib, and Aunt Petunia had known what Azkaban was. He looked at Ron curiously, wanting to see his response to his "other life."

Ron had a very strange expression on his face and was looking from the single bed to his two friends. "Erm. So we'll all sleep here?"

Hermione looked up and also got a strange expression on her face. Harry was a bit embarrassed at this and thought he knew what it was about. She waved her wand at the floor and white down blankets appeared out of thin air with two feather mattresses. "Not much room for working, is there?" She moved the trunk into the corner, making herself perfectly at home, piling the books on all three mattresses in what looked like a jumbled heap.

Harry blinked. He had never shared a dorm with Hermione and had had no clue how she lived. Her homework and life had always been in such order, he had just always assumed her room had taken after that. Certainly, there appeared to be a certain order to Hermione's stacks, but he was darned if he could figure it out. There were so many books and so little room, that it was quite hopeless. The stacks grew mountainous and he now understood why the trunk had been so very heavy.

Ron looked surprised at the clutter as well, and together they inched backwards to make room for extra heaps of books. Hermione wasn't paying much attention to the two boys, just rummaged some more, stopping every now and then to fondle a particularly old and lethal looking volume tenderly and tuck it carefully onto the fluffy down mattress.

"Not like that!" Hermione squawked as Harry reached out to peruse one particular volume--_ The Avada Kedavra: Deathly Portents from the Unforgivable Man_ by Hawling Wulff-- "Madame Pince is going to _kill_ me if she..." Hermione cut herself off and blushed an un-Hermioneish scarlet as she busied herself some more with stacking the books on the mattresses.

"Um...Hermione?" Ron croaked cautiously. "Madame Pince does know you've got them, doesn't she?"

Hermione buried herself a bit deeper into Harry's magical trunk. "I've got permission, and that's all you need to know." There was a clatter and a gasp. "Harry! Oh, Harry!" Hermione's head withdrew from the gaping maw of the trunk, quite white. She was tugging something out of the trunk, wide-eyed. Harry's stomach dropped and he looked out the window. He knew what it would be.

"Blimey!" Ron's mouth dropped as he stared at Dumbledore's Pensieve with those strange, beautifully ancient runes around the rim. "Blimey Harry, where'd you get it?"

Hermione was watching Harry curiously. "Dumbledore gave this to you?" She ran her finger around the runes, likely reading them.

Harry shook his head. "No. Madam Pomfrey did. She said he'd asked that I have it if he...well...you know, but she didn't know why." Harry shrugged his shoulders and looked at the Pensieve warily, he'd had one too many bad experiences with the thing to be overly excited about the inheritance. "She also gave me..." Hermione let out an awed gasp from the cavernous trunk and retrieved Gryffindor's ruby sword with reverence. "That." Harry finished unnecessarily.

"Wow." Ron looked agog at this impressive inheritance.

"I guess with the funeral, and Bill's wedding I just forgot to mention it." Harry felt a swoop of the mixed rage and sadness as he remembered how Dumbledore had died. He remembered something else, just then, that had been nagging the corners of his mind. "Madam Pomfrey seemed to have been quite close to Dumbledore. She knew an awful lot about him."

"Well, they worked together for nearly fifty years, didn't they?" Ron said reasonably.

"Yes. But still." Harry didn't voice it but he thought it was quite possible Dumbledore had been in love with Madam Pomfrey, and judging by her pale, drawn face when doling out per Dumbledore's requests there was a good chance it had been mutual.

"What did she say to you?" Hermione held the sword in one hand, looking over at him in interest.

"It was just before the funeral. She was so...sad. She didn't cry at all, just said that Dumbledore had loved me very much. Like a grandson." Harry's felt a numbness inside him, and pushed the sensation away. "That I'd been on the will since my parents died, and she didn't know much, but that they...the sword and the Pensieve were probably very important to defeating Voldemort."

Harry didn't say it but there had been something for Snape as well. Madam Pomfrey had let it slip in her grief, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve which draped past her wrist and nearly covered her hand.

Hermione didn't seem to be paying any attention to them, anymore. She had leaned the glittering, red ruby sword against a teetering pile of books. Her mouth was in a severe line, and her brow was furrowed. She was staring intently at the Pensieve as if she had just figured out a great mystery. She now looked anxiously from Harry to the relic, as if she very much wanted to say something but wasn't sure it was her place.

"Everything okay, Hermione?"

"Yes. Yes." Her voice was breathless as if the matter her mind was fixed upon were requiring life-breath. "It's just. Well. Harry didyouthinkmaybe." She stopped and took a deep breath.

"You were there, Harry. When your...your...that Halloween night. It's in your mind. Your memory." She closed her eyes and Harry understood then with a feeling as if he'd been punched in the stomach. "I think it's why he wanted it to be yours. To find out what _really_ happened," she finished quietly.

Ron was now looking shrewdly at the Pensieve. "But Hermione, we don't know how to get the memory. We'd have to sift through alot of..."

"There's a book...just..." Hermione's eyes flew open and she looked at Harry with sisterly concern. "Harry?"

Ron looked over at him, very worried. "Hey mate, if you can't, don't. No one would want to see that."

Harry spoke through the hole in his heart, that leaked the blood down his whole body and left a tingling, terrible sensation in all of him. "No. No. I think you're right. We just need to get the memory, and it probably won't be terribly clear. When I was going through Dumbledore's memories the clarity depended on the person whose memories we were looking at. It's a...an immature view, probably."

"Oh, Harry." Hermione spoke to her piles of books gravely. "I've got a book on memory sifting. I almost didn't take it, but then I thought it might help on thinking about what Dumbledore showed you." She dove in, straight to the pile nearest Ron, tumbling a batch of them into his lap. "Whoops. Sorry." She had a thin book clutched to herself, which she flipped open eagerly. "Here it is. _Concentrate on the memory you want and use the incantation biolobot_." She shoved the book in Harry's direction, and started stacking the books away from the mattresses, which she scrunched together, the Pensieve in the middle of the mattress heap.

Harry took a deep breath and placed the tip of his wand to his forehead as he'd seen Dumbledore do so many times. He wished his heart would slow down, but he was so very excited, and anxious. He didn't think Hermione and Ron could ever understand his excitement of seeing his parents, even if it was only to watch them die. They'd never really lost anyone, not like him.

He'd never gotten to know his Mum and Dad properly and he'd always longed to really hear them, really know them. He used to dream about this when he was little. His chance was now. He was more then ready. "_Biolobot_." He whispered shakily. A long silver dollop of memory came out as he drew his wand out toward the Pensieve. He swallowed again. Grief always made him swallow more then normal.

"Wait, Harry." Ron was watching him very worriedly. "I, well... Remember the mirror of Erised?"

Harry was a little annoyed at this interruption but nodded. Ron was his best friend, his first friend, he had been with him through everything.

"Well..." Ron hedged. He looked a bit uneasy about what he was about to say. "Dumbledore said that it wasn't good to dwell on the past and forget the future. I mean...of course we've got to do it. But...just be careful. That's all."

Hermione looked impressed at Ron's little speech. "Maybe he let you look at the mirror to prepare you for this, Harry. So you'd know the dangers."

Ron looked at Harry. "And we're not letting you do it alone. You knew that, of course."

Harry smiled. "Yeah. Yeah." They were right, and even if he didn't want to hear it, he wasn't going to ignore his friends. He stooped over the wide basin, and leaned down beside it. "Ready?" He touched the clear swirling quicksilver in the old sieve. Hermione and Ron, who were watching him for instructions on what to do, touched it gingerly as well. "Ready," he said mostly to himself, and felt himself falling down, Ron and Hermione with him.


End file.
